On August 31, 2010, the night before President Barack Obama’s dinner inaugurating direct talks between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Hamas gunmen shot and killed four Jewish settlers in Hebron, the West Bank’s largest and most populous governorate. The attack—the deadliest against Israeli citizens in over two years—was condemned by officials from both sides, who said that it was meant to thwart the upcoming negotiations. According to a Hamas spokesman, however, the shooting had a more specific purpose: to demonstrate the futility of the recent cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces. This cooperation had expanded under the quiet direction of a three-star US Army general, Keith Dayton, commander of a little-publicized American mission to build up Palestinian security capability in the West Bank.1
Referred to by Hamas as “the Dayton forces,” the security apparatus was formally under the authority of Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president and head of Hamas’s rival party, Fatah, but it was, in practice, controlled by Salam Fayyad, the unelected prime minister, a diminutive, mild-mannered technocrat.2 Abbas appointed Fayyad following Hamas’s grim takeover of Gaza in June 2007 and entrusted him with preventing the same thing from happening in the West Bank.
Fayyad received a doctorate in economics from the University of Texas at Austin and held positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) before becoming finance minister under Yasir Arafat.3 His reputation as a fiscally responsible and trustworthy manager ensured the steady supply of international aid on which the Palestinian economy depends. Though he had neither a popular following nor backing from a large political party (his Third Way list received a mere 2.4 percent of the votes in the 2006 legislative elections), he was in charge of nearly every aspect of Palestinian governance. He didn’t, however, participate in the negotiations over a settlement with Israel, which are the province of the PLO (Fayyad is not a member of its leadership) and are handled by its chairman, Abbas, who turned eighty-one in 2016.
Fayyad was criticized at home for many of the same reasons he was lauded abroad. He condemned violence against Israel as antithetical to his people’s national aspirations, stated that Palestinian refugees could be resettled not in Israel but in a future Palestinian state, and suggested that this state would offer citizenship to Jews. He was praised in the opinion pages of The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, and had good relations with foreign leaders unpopular in Palestine: on Fayyad’s first visit to the Oval Office, in 2003, George W. Bush greeted him with index and pinky fingers extended to display UT Austin’s “Hook ’em Horns” sign. When the daughter of Ariel Sharon’s chief of staff was married two years later, Fayyad sat next to Sharon at the wedding and talked with him for several hours.4
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In February 2010, Fayyad spoke before Israel’s security establishment at the annual Herzliya Conference, where he was compared by Shimon Peres to David Ben-Gurion. Much of Fayyad’s speech concerned his ambitious plan, made public in late August 2009, to establish unilaterally a de facto Palestinian state within two years. By that time, according to Fayyad, “the reality of the state will impose itself on the world.” Fayyad’s goal to “build” a state—he did not say he would declare one—was endorsed by the Middle East Quartet and supported eagerly by international donors.5
Some Palestinians rejected Fayyad’s plan as too closely resembling Benjamin Netanyahu’s notion of “economic peace,” which proposes that development precede independence. And a number of Israelis expressed suspicions that Palestine would seek UN recognition of its statehood when the plan was complete. Israel’s then foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman warned that any unilateral steps Fayyad took toward a state could prompt Israel to annul past agreements and annex parts of the West Bank.6
Fayyad said that his idea was “intended to generate pressure” on negotiations. Mike Herzog, chief of staff to defense minister Ehud Barak, speculated that Fayyad thought political negotiations would not succeed, making his plan “the only game in town.” The danger, for Israel and the Palestinian Authority alike, was what would happen if both initiatives failed. Israel, Herzog said, would not withdraw from territory in response to a declaration or a UN resolution. The risk was that Hamas would be able to present a persuasive argument that violence was the only means of achieving national liberation.7
During its first year, Fayyad’s strategy was succeeding. His administration started more than one thousand development projects, which included paving roads, planting trees, digging wells, and constructing new buildings, most prominently in the twin cities of Ramallah and al-Bireh. He reduced dependence on foreign aid and began carrying out plans to build new hospitals, classrooms, courthouses, industrial parks, homes, and even a new city, Rawabi, between Ramallah and Nablus. But “reforming the security forces,” Ghassan Khatib, a spokesman for the Palestinian Authority, told me, was “the main and integral part of the Fayyad plan. Many of the government’s other successes, such as economic growth, came as a result.”8
To its constituents, Fayyad’s government presented reform of the police and other security forces as principally a matter of providing law and order—apprehending criminal gangs, consolidating competing security services, forbidding public displays of weapons, and locating stolen cars. But its program for “counterterrorism”—directed mainly against Hamas and viewed by many Palestinians as collaboration with Israel—was its most important element: the targeting of Hamas members and suspected sympathizers was intended to reduce the likelihood of a West Bank takeover and, as important, helped Fayyad make a plausible case that he was in control and that Israel could safely withdraw from the territory.
In 2009, Palestinian and Israeli forces took part in nearly thirteen hundred coordinated activities, many of them against militant Palestinian groups, a 72 percent increase over the previous year.9 Together they largely disbanded the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a principal Fatah militia; attacked Islamic Jihad cells; and all but eliminated Hamas’s social institutions, financial arrangements, and military operations in the West Bank.
According to the 2009 annual report of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, “continuous [counterterrorist] activity conducted by Israel and the Palestinian security apparatuses is the main reason” that attacks from residents of the West Bank and East Jerusalem declined to their lowest numbers since 2000.10 Under Fayyad the level of cooperation, Herzog said, was “better than before the Second Intifada even—it’s excellent.” Mona Mansour, a Hamas legislator in the Palestinian parliament and widow of an assassinated senior leader of the movement, told me, “The PA has succeeded more than the Israelis in crushing Hamas in the West Bank.”11
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At the center of the security reforms were nine “special battalions” of the National Security Forces, which in 2010 was an eight-thousand-member gendarmerie that made up the largest unit of the then twenty-five thousand-strong Palestinian armed forces in the West Bank.12 The officer in charge of the vetting, training, equipping, and strategic planning of these special battalions was Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, the US security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority from 2005 to 2010.
In a desert town sixteen miles southeast of Amman, more than three thousand Palestinians completed nineteen-week military courses under Dayton’s supervision at the Jordan International Police Training Center, built with American funds in 2003 for the instruction of Iraqi police. In Hebron, Jenin, Jericho, and Ramallah, the Dayton mission organized the construction and renovation of garrisons, training colleges, facilities for the Interior Ministry, and security headquarters—some of which, like the one I visited on a hilltop in central Hebron in 2010, had been destroyed by Israel during the Second Intifada. The office of the US Security Coordinator (USSC) planned to build new camps in Bethlehem, Tubas, and Tulkarm, and additional facilities in Hebron and Ramallah. It offered two-month leadership courses to senior PA officers and created and appointed advisers to a Strategic Planning Directorate in the Ministry of Interior. Between 2007 and 2010, the US State Department allocated $392 million to the Dayton mission, with another $320 million granted between 2011 and 2013.13
At its headquarters in a nineteenth-century stone building at the US consulate in West Jerusalem, the USSC had a forty-five-person core staff composed primarily of American and Canadian but also British and Turkish military officers. In addition, it employed twenty-eight private contractors from the Virginia-based DynCorp International. By late 2011—a date that dovetailed with Fayyad’s deadline—the USSC planned to have supervised the training of one NSF battalion for every West Bank governorate except Jerusalem.14
General Dayton reported to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Admiral Mike Mullen, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He advised George Mitchell, the special envoy for Middle East peace, and was praised by influential senators, representatives, and Middle East analysts, who viewed the work of the USSC as a singular achievement. As a result of Dayton’s activity, Israel granted greater responsibility to Palestinian security forces, expanding their geographical areas of operation, sharing higher-quality intelligence, and lifting the midnight-to-five-a.m. curfews in several of the largest West Bank cities. Israel also reduced the travel time between most urban centers in the West Bank by opening roads, relaxing controls at checkpoints, lifting vehicle permit requirements, and removing physical obstacles, which were reduced to nearly their lowest number since 2005.15
Colonel Philip J. Dermer, a member of the USSC, wrote in a March 2010 report circulated among senior White House and military staff that the “mission has arguably achieved more progress on the ground than any other US effort in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.” Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, remarked, “You can send George Mitchell back and forth to the Middle East as much as you like, but expanding what Dayton is doing in the security realm to other sectors of Palestinian governance and society is really the only viable model for progress.”16
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The first US security coordinator, Lieutenant General William (Kip) Ward, arrived in Jerusalem in March 2005. Elliott Abrams, deputy national security adviser to George W. Bush, told me that Ward’s mission was organized in response to three closely coinciding events: the 2004 reelection of Bush, who wanted to rebuild Palestinian security forces as a part of his Roadmap to Middle East Peace; the death, nine days later, of Arafat, who had resisted American attempts to reform the security services; and the victory of America’s favored candidate, Mahmoud Abbas, in the January 2005 presidential election.17
Ward’s mission concentrated initially on security reform but soon focused on preparing for Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza and four northern West Bank settlements. The withdrawal went fairly smoothly for Israel, but Ward failed to prevent violence on the Palestinian side. Settler greenhouses were looted, empty synagogues were burned, and Palestinians began fighting one another for control of Gaza.18
Weeks after Dayton took over from Ward, Hamas defeated Fatah in the January 2006 parliamentary election. Overnight, Dayton’s task changed from reforming the security forces to preventing a Hamas-led government from controlling them. State Department lawyers sought ways to continue assisting the Fatah-dominated security forces of the Palestinian Authority, which were soon to be led by Hamas, a group the United States had declared a terrorist organization. The solution was to send direct aid to President Abbas, who was elected separately and could be considered detached from the incoming government and legislature. In a reversal of its long-standing policy of pressuring the Palestinian president to give power to the cabinet, the United States advised Abbas to issue decrees and make appointments that would limit the new government’s rule, particularly over the security forces. Hamas reacted by establishing a security service of its own. Abbas banned the Hamas force in a decree that the cabinet then declared illegal. During the next year, Hamas and Fatah engaged in a series of violent clashes in which cadres on both sides were assassinated.19
Khalid Mish‘al, the chief of Hamas’s political bureau, delivered a fiery speech denouncing the “security coup” as a “conspiracy” supported by “the Zionists and the Americans”—charges Fatah denied. In February 2007, on the brink of civil war, Fatah and Hamas leaders traveled to Mecca, where they agreed to form a national unity government, a deal the United States opposed because it preferred that Fatah continue to isolate Hamas. Fayyad became finance minister in the new government, despite, he said, American pressure not to join. The Peruvian diplomat Alvaro de Soto, who had been the UN envoy to the Quartet, wrote in a confidential “End of Mission Report” that the violence between Hamas and Fatah could have been avoided had the United States not strongly opposed Palestinian reconciliation. “The US,” he wrote, “clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and Hamas.”20
One month before taking control of Gaza in June 2007, Hamas forces attacked USSC-trained troops at their base, killing seven and withdrawing only after three Israeli tanks approached. Testifying before Congress the following week, Dayton claimed that the attack had been repulsed, and he denied that Hamas was on the rise—a claim not borne out during the following weeks. In Gaza, “it took [Hamas] just a few days,” said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, “to flush away a 53,000-strong PA security apparatus which was a fourteen-year Western investment.”21
Yet the defeat of American-backed Fatah forces offered a rather different lesson to the small circle that had influence over the USSC. “We didn’t regard this as proof the project wasn’t working,” Abrams said, “but rather that the project was needed.”22
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Gaza was lost, but in Abbas’s appointment of an emergency cabinet led by Salam Fayyad, the United States felt it had “the best Palestinian Authority government in history.” So I was told by David Welch, a former assistant secretary of state who helped oversee the Dayton mission. The Bush administration ended its fourteen-month embargo of the PA, Israel released $500 million in withheld taxes, Palestinian and Israeli security forces increased their coordination, and the USSC rapidly expanded its operations. In Fayyad’s first three and a half months as prime minister, the PA mounted a campaign in the West Bank against charities, businesses, preachers, and civil servants affiliated with Hamas, arresting some fifteen hundred of the movement’s members and suspected sympathizers. “Once it became clear that Hamas had won in Gaza,” Welch said, “then the whole thing was a lot cleaner to do in the West Bank.”23
By late October 2007, the government was making an intensive effort to maintain order in Nablus, one of the West Bank’s most turbulent cities; in Jenin the following May, a special battalion trained by the USSC led the largest operation ever mounted by the PA.24 Both operations won approval from local residents, who were grateful for improved security. But these actions were dependent not only on restraint by Hamas and Islamic Jihad but also on the support of Israel, including the amnesty it offered to Fatah gunmen.
Many Palestinians saw the campaigns by their security forces as an effort to suppress Hamas—the victors in free and fair elections—and also to prevent attacks against Israel. “The challenge for Fayyad and Abbas,” Ghaith al-Omari, a former foreign policy adviser to Abbas, told me, “is that for many Palestinians violence against Israel is a nationalist, respectable endeavor.” This view was confirmed by reactions to a February 2008 suicide bombing at a shopping center in Dimona, Israel, and the shooting one month later of eight students at a yeshiva in West Jerusalem. More than three-quarters of polled Palestinians supported the attacks, which were praised by Hamas and condemned by the PA.25
Over the following year, the PA alienated itself from the public still further, and with little aid from Hamas. At an Israeli base north of Ramallah, the journalist Nahum Barnea attended a meeting between Palestinian and Israeli commanders. Barnea reported in Yediot Aharonot, one of Israel’s two most widely circulated newspapers, that the head of the Palestinian National Security Forces told the Israelis, “We have a common enemy,” and the chief of Palestinian military intelligence said, “We are taking care of every Hamas institution in accordance with your instructions.”26 The article was later translated in the Palestinian press.
Another blow to the PA’s popularity came when Israeli forces evicted some two hundred Jews from a contested building in Hebron, and settlers in the area vandalized ambulances and mosques, set fire to cars and homes, and shot and wounded Palestinian residents. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said he was “ashamed at the scenes of Jews opening fire at innocent Arabs,” an event he called a “pogrom.” When the riots spread to the Palestinian-controlled part of the city, Hebron locals watched as their security forces quietly disappeared. Both the former governor, later appointed Abbas’s chief of staff, and the NSF commander of Hebron, a Hamas stronghold, told me that Israeli soldiers regularly made incursions into PA-controlled areas, forcing, the governor said, “humiliated and insulted” Palestinian troops to withdraw to their barracks.27 Perceptions of collaboration were heightened, they added, by Israel’s frequent practice of arresting people who had just been released from Palestinian detention.
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The greatest damage to the reputation of the Palestinian security forces occurred during the December 2008–January 2009 Israeli war in Gaza. In plainclothes and uniform, PA officers in the West Bank surrounded mosques, kept young men from approaching Israeli checkpoints, arrested protesters chanting Hamas slogans, and dispersed demonstrators with batons, pepper spray, and tear gas. The trust between Israeli and Palestinian forces was so great, Dayton said, that “a good portion of the Israeli army went off to Gaza.” Barak Ben-Zur, a former head of counterterrorism in Israeli military intelligence and later special assistant to the director of the Shin Bet, told me that “in Israeli Arab cities there were more protests against the war than in the West Bank,” thanks to the “total quiet kept by the Palestinian security services.” Avigdor Lieberman later said, “Mahmoud Abbas himself called and asked us, pressured us to continue the military campaign and overthrow Hamas.”28
Following the war in Gaza, Dayton spoke before an influential group of politicians and analysts at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where he boasted of his mission’s accomplishments: building a force that worked against Hamas and cooperated with Israel during the war, and creating “new men” through USSC training of Palestinian troops. Israeli commanders, he said, asked him how quickly he could produce more. His comments were not well received in Palestine, where they reinforced the image of the United States and Israel as puppeteers. The Palestinian Authority sent a formal complaint about Dayton’s “unacceptable declarations”; senior Palestinian officials, including Fayyad, refused to attend meetings with Dayton; and, according to Jane’s Defence Weekly, “owing to tensions in the relationship between Dayton and the civilian Palestinian leadership, his role [was] scaled down.”29
For Fayyad, Dayton’s speech could not have been more poorly timed; it followed the release of a widely publicized poll that had found the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy among West Bank residents at record lows, and it occurred just weeks after Palestinians held large demonstrations protesting an alleged attempt by PA security forces to assassinate Sheikh Hamed al-Beitawi, a prominent Hamas leader in the West Bank. Beitawi, a member of parliament, chairman of the Palestinian Islamic Scholars Association, and a cleric well known for his sermons at the al-Aqsa Mosque, had escaped an attack by unidentified assailants once before. The Palestinian Authority later banned him from preaching, and two of his sons were arrested. Yet Beitawi said he was confident that the Fayyad government would not last. “Fatah and the PA are going down for two reasons,” he told me in Nablus: “corruption and coordination with the Israelis.”30
In December 2009, when Israeli forces in Nablus, allegedly acting on a tip from PA security services, killed three militants suspected of murdering a West Bank rabbi, more than twenty-thousand Palestinians attended the funeral, which turned into a protest against the PA’s security cooperation with Israel. Several days later, Hamas’s al-Aqsa TV broadcast a cartoon with a chorus singing, “We swear that we will not be terrorized by Dayton.”31 The cartoon revolved around a character named Balool, a Palestinian commander who could be seen kissing the boots of Israeli soldiers, wearing a beret bearing the insignia “Dayton,” and claiming not to represent any political faction, upon which his pants fell to reveal underwear colored in Fatah’s yellow.
On the day the cartoon was shown on television, Abbas, who was depicted in it as an Israeli soldier’s marionette, told an interviewer, “We are not Israel’s security guards.” Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Doha-based television preacher who is watched by an audience of tens of millions, said in a sermon broadcast on Qatar TV that “if it is proven that [Abbas] incited Israel to strike Gaza, he deserves not merely to be executed, but to be stoned to death.”32
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Islamists have hardly been the only critics of Dayton and the security forces. In an op-ed entitled “Jericho’s Stasi,” a former Palestinian human rights advocate and strong critic of the PA wrote, “I would like to suggest that General Dayton not just train agents in the use of weapons, beating, and torture … but also train them how to behave among their own people.” The NSF trained by Dayton were not authorized to make arrests, but they regularly led joint operations with other security services whose leaders were trained by the USSC, and that had, according to Human Rights Watch and Palestinian human rights groups, practiced torture. A year into Fayyad’s first term, Mamdouh al-Aker, head of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights, spoke of the government’s “militarization” and asserted that “a state of lawlessness had shifted to a sort of a security state, a police state.”33
Charges of authoritarianism subsequently intensified. Abbas, whose term expired during the war in Gaza, was ruling by presidential decree. There had been no legislature since June 2007, and judicial rulings were frequently ignored by the security services. Fayyad, for all his commitment to accountability and transparency, was repeatedly found in polls to be seen as less legitimate than the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh, and he oversaw a government that a 2008 Global Integrity Index ranked, in a tie with Iraq, as the sixth most corrupt in the world.34
In other respects, too, the Palestinian Authority’s practices came under severe criticism.35 According to Shawan Jabarin, the director of the human rights group al-Haq, torture had become routine. In polls taken after Fayyad took office, West Bank residents consistently reported feeling less safe than Gazans, whose lives under Hamas rule were in many respects worse. The West Bank Ministry of Religious Affairs dictated Friday sermons to be read by imams. Palestinian journalists, according to Amnesty International, were detained and threatened during the Gaza war for reporting on government suppression. During the first three years Fayyad was prime minister, the Palestinian Authority twice ranked lower in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index than any other Arab government. And in 2010 Freedom House gave the Palestinian Authority the same rating for political rights that it did for civil liberties—“not free.”36
Fayyad attempted to strengthen his credibility with Palestinians by participating in acts of “peaceful resistance”—demonstrations against Israel’s security wall and burnings of products made in Israeli settlements. But in the view of Sam Bahour, a Palestinian entrepreneur and advocate of civil rights, the government’s decision “to adopt one small element” of an existing and more comprehensive boycott was mere “window dressing” meant to cover up “a heavy-handed security state whose primary goals are to keep Hamas and criticism of the government in check.” On August 25, 2010, when leftist and independent political parties held a rally against direct talks with Israel, it was violently broken up by PA security forces.37
Earlier that year, the Palestinian Authority prepared for municipal elections, which Hamas, citing political repression, announced it would boycott. Khalil Shikaki, the most prominent Palestinian pollster, told me that the purpose of the elections was “to further weaken Hamas and bolster the government’s legitimacy.” When Fatah’s internal divisions prevented it from agreeing on candidate lists, the Palestinian Authority canceled the elections, denying that it had done so because Fatah feared losing. But Shawan Jabarin told me that the government’s denial was not credible: “In May and June, we learned of tens or hundreds of cases where Hamas followers were questioned by the security forces about the municipal elections and asked if they want to run or not, if they want to vote or not, to whom they want to give their vote.” At his office in Ramallah, Shikaki said that because people in Gaza felt freer to express their political views to his staff, “We get more accurate reporting on how people voted in the last election in Gaza than we do here.”38
In his 2010 report, the USSC’s Colonel Dermer wrote, “While Israelis and [US] officials view recent PA successes in the field rather myopically as a win against terror, wary Palestinians view them as new regime protection.” A shortcoming of US efforts, he wrote, was “the undefined nature of the USSC mission and its desired end state. Is the aim for the PA to take on and defeat Hamas militarily? To seek vengeance for the loss of Gaza? To maintain order on Israel’s behalf? Or is it to lay the security groundwork for a free and independent democratic Palestinian state?” Ghandi Amin, a director at the Independent Commission for Human Rights, told me, “I have no hope for the Fayyad plan. I look on the ground and see only an increased role for security agencies.”39
In 2011, Lieutenant General Michael Moeller, who replaced Dayton, received the USSC’s largest ever appropriation. His task, as the deadlines for both the Fayyad plan and the end of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations approached, was to advance two irreconcilable goals: building a Palestinian force that could guarantee Israeli security while, at the same time, lessening the perception that the United States was firmly supporting what many residents of the West Bank, like the independent politician Mustafa Barghouti, had come to describe not as one occupation but two.40
—September 2010